The Stakeholders of Nautical Tourism Process in Destination Network: Topological Positions and Management Participation

Abstract

A tourist destination most often represents a complex and fragmented system of various stakeholders with interrelated interests that operate on a more or less network principle. Managing and synchronizing to all important destination stakeholders is a very important prerequisite for delivering a quality and competitive tourist product. It is also a very important balance between stakeholder participation in tourism activities / processes and involvement in key destination management decision making. An additional complexity in system synchronization is contributed by sub-network groups grouped around a specific and dominant tourist concept, in this case, nautical activities and processes in the destination. In this respect, it was important to investigate their topological position in relation to other destination stakeholders in order to assess the potential of their common influence on the central actors of destination management, i.e., key destination decision making. For this purpose, a total destination network analysis was performed and a separate analysis of the nautical stakeholder sub-network based on the mathematical graph of the social network and a correlation analysis of the obtained results / parameters of each of them with the level of their participation in key destination management decisions. The results of the analysis have shown that, unlike the general destination network, in the case of nautical sub-networks there is no statistically significant correlation between the topological position (potential of influence) and the level of participation in the most important destination management decisions. Specifically, their topological position is considerably more salient in relation to their participation in destination management decision-making, indicating their specific passivity in this regard and requiring new institutional and organizational solutions by central management structures.

Keywords

• tourist destination
• stakeholder network centrality nautical sub-network
• topological position of stakeholders participation in decision making